


Enumerations

by alphaenterprise



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Mild Angst, Post-Star Trek: Into Darkness, my first foray into the star trek fandom, spirk, with a happy ending of course
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 00:09:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1837198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alphaenterprise/pseuds/alphaenterprise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spock sees James Tiberius Kirk die once, twice, thrice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enumerations

Spock sees James Tiberius Kirk die once, twice, thrice.

 

Every time his eyes shutter closed, he sees Kirk’s hand slide down the thick pane of glass that sealed the chamber to the Enterprise’s warp core and privately ticks and tallies the times he views his captain’s death. It is kept in the back of his mind, tucked away and rife with a strange burning sensation that flares up every time the count goes up by one.

 

Spock sees James Tiberius Kirk die ten, eleven, twelve times. He rips a sharply ridged rectangle of metal from the high-speed craft that he scrabbled with Khan on and slams it against the back of the superhuman’s head mercilessly. His blood is thick and coagulates when he inhales it, but the first officer sees vicious red and does not cease in his repeated attacks on Khan’s person as Uhura screams at him until the word ‘Jim’ passes her lips. The haze clears minutely, sharpened into crystal focus, and Spock breaks Khan’s other arm if only to hear the crunch.

 

If he is too rough with the prisoner and begins to break his back when he is hauled back to the ship then Spock does not mention it.

 

After the fifty seventh time, Spock begins to dream. Some human part of his brain must have been rattled awake, as Vulcans do not dream, and he tamps down the clamminess that seems to surround him when he is startled into awareness. His quarters are too warm and his blood thrums with something that sends him pacing through the vastness of the enterprise as the crew alternates between remaining on the ship after their almost-death and scurrying off to earth to cope with the same.

 

Spock sees Kirk die sixty two, sixty three, and sixty four times. He cannot keep his hands still and walks miles and miles until, inevitably, he finds himself straying to the shut door to a hospital room that he has yet to enter. The metal is cold and does not warrant invitation, etched with the Starfleet insignia and emblazoned with a device that displays both the patient’s name and the doctor’s name.

 

He turns on his heel and walks miles and miles again, until he thinks that he can recreate the road system of San Francisco in less than a minute. When Kirk dies sixty eight and sixty nine times, Spock’s shoulders hunch and he beelines to his shore-side quarters with a stride that is almost a lope but more than a walk.

 

Uhura cannot play chess well enough to block out the roll-over from eighty nine to ninety and Spock proceeds to completely destroy her with a mild sense of unrepentant, undeserved anger. She is not Jim and neither is anyone else that he speaks to, and ‘therein lies the problem’ Nyota Uhura tells him with a smile and a pang of hurt and an unspoken goodbye. The familiar lance of grief is merely tinged with remorse at their failed relationship and more consumed with the golden captain who might or might not ever wake up and possibly even more overtaken by the ninety fifth and ninety sixth time that Kirk dies behind his eyelids.

 

It is illogical, some Vulcan part of him mutters, cast away and accessed erratically since Khan was re-frozen. Illogical to be so consumed with a singular death, as it is a routine occurrence and is ‘nothing special’, to use a terran term.

 

Yet it is even more illogical that James Tiberius Kirk dies two hundred and thirty five and two hundred and thirty six times behind Commander Spock’s eyes before the dawn breaks. He is as infallible and unfailing as the properties of Scotty’s transwarp equation, the gravitational constants that have been calculated for all of the planets that the federation knows of, and yet he is, illogically, dimmed perhaps permanently.

 

Without a sun, all planets will die. It is given and understood and unchangeable and Spock knows this and cannot fathom why that fact chooses to flit through his subconscious.

 

So he sleeps and dreams and dreams and dreams until Kirk dies four hundred and twenty one times and Spock himself lingers for what feels like hours at the door to his captain’s room before the cycle repeats.

 

James Tiberius Kirk dies one thousand times, and the one thousand and first time that Spock feels rather than sees the ta’al fall limp. When he opens his eyes, he strides into the room and makes eye contact with bones just as the doctor is gearing up for some sort of protest. All words die on his tongue and something eases when the barest mutter of ‘hobgoblin’ interrupts the incessant whirr of machinery.

 

"You were barely dead." Bones rolls his eyes when Jim grins weakly and shuffles out in his characteristic gruff manner and doesn’t even bother to conceal the brief, rattling inhale that he takes with misty eyes as the pneumatic door hisses shut.

 

Spock does not know what to do with himself when his eyes finally meet with Jim’s and he simply takes two steps to align himself closely to the biobed. Jim laughs, hoarse and raspy, and even though he looks as if death has only just left, he still radiates sunlight and warmth and a produces a metaphorical gravitational field of his own that the magnitude could draw in an entire system’s worth of planets and planetoids.

 

Jim lays his hand palm up against the crisp white sheets and Spock’s follows almost mechanically to rest against the cold railing. There is something unspoken between them, crackling with an energy that shouldn’t come from such a weak, psi-null species, and it is Jim, Jim, always Jim who makes moves that surprise him when they should not. His index and middle fingers come up to press against Spock’s almost clumsily, unused to such movement after his coma, and James Tiberius Kirk singlehandedly conveys and listens to everything that the Vulcan has been trying to say.

 

The captain grins to his first officer as they settle into their chairs on the refitted Enterprise, presses a cocky kiss to Spock’s high cheekbone, and orders Sulu to punch it as he sprawls into his earned position in the chair.

 

James Tiberius Kirk burns like a supernova and dies one thousand seven hundred and fourty seven times and lives one thousand seven hundred and fourty eight and that is all to be said on the matter.

**Author's Note:**

> crossposted from my tumblr (alphajager!) because i'm trying to get all my stuff onto my ao3 that i actually like haha


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